Single-family offices now manage an average of $2.4 billion in assets under management, up from $1.8 billion eighteen months prior, according to Ocorian's 2025 global survey of 385 family offices across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Headcount rose in parallel—62% of respondents added staff in the past year, with 38% increasing teams by three or more full-time equivalents. The expansion is not administrative. Offices are hiring investment professionals and operational specialists to handle complexity in alternatives.
Alternative allocations crossed 40% of portfolios on average, a 900-basis-point increase from 2023. Private credit leads inflows, with 54% of offices adding exposure in the past twelve months. Venture capital and direct co-investments follow at 48% and 41%, respectively. Public equities declined to 35% of the average portfolio, down from 42% two years ago. Fixed income held flat near 18%. The rebalancing reflects structural mistrust of duration risk and a hunt for yield in private markets where liquidity constraints are acceptable to generational capital.
The shift carries second-order consequences for asset managers and intermediaries. Multi-family offices reported $18.7 billion in median pooled assets, a 22% increase year-over-year, driven by consolidation among smaller single-family offices unwilling to build in-house teams for alternatives. Managers with sub-$100 million minimums in private credit or secondaries funds gained access to this capital without the infrastructure costs of courting institutionals. Concurrently, 29% of single-family offices told Ocorian they plan to raise risk exposure further in 2025, targeting sectors institutionals avoid: early-stage biotech, frontier market debt, and pre-IPO technology secondaries.
Operational maturity remains uneven. 47% of offices lack dedicated compliance personnel despite holding illiquid positions across multiple jurisdictions. 33% still use spreadsheets for portfolio tracking, a vulnerability as alternatives complexity grows. The professionalization lag creates openings for service providers offering outsourced middle-office functions—fund administration, tax structuring, and LP reporting—priced for family-office scale.
Watch three follow-on signals in the next six to nine months: placement agent data on family-office LP commitments to funds with $500 million to $2 billion target raises, indicating whether this appetite translates to closed capital; hiring patterns among boutique wealth advisors specializing in alternatives, which would confirm the trend is broad-based rather than concentrated in the largest offices; and any regulatory commentary from the SEC or FCA on family-office risk disclosures, which could formalize the professionalization already underway informally.
The multi-family office consolidation wave has eighteen months left before the smaller shops either scale or dissolve into external managers.